The Vidal exemption

THIS MARCH, in its 120th-anniversary issue, The Nation published a weird piece by Gore Vidal that presumed on the cultural exemption he has long seemed to enjoy for his most extravagant statements. He described Norman Podhoretz (along with his wife, Midge Decter) as "a lobbyist for a foreign power," i.e., Israel; as refusing to be an "assimilated American"; as a member of the right-wing "Israeli Fifth Column Division," who ought to register as an agent of a foreign power; as making common cause with anti-Semites and "Jesus-Christers"; as starring in a supposititious Woody Allen film called The Purple Prose of West End Avenue, i.e., one of New York's Jewish neighborhoods; and as reveling joyously "in the politics of hate, with plangent attacks on blacks and/or fags and/or liberals."

The root of Vidal's frenzy may be discerned in that last formulation: In one of his newspaper columns Podhoretz did lament the passage of New York's gay-rights statute. But all of this seemed too much for the sober neoconservative editor, who sent a letter to thirty liberal friends of The Nation asking whether they saw fit to protest Vidal's anti-Semitic screaming. Twenty-one men of goodwill did not respond. Six expressed disapproval of the article; three resented Podhoretz's letter. Tom Wicker and Roger Wilkins held the Vidal piece up to the light and saw no anti-Semitism in it, though they can spot "racism" at a distance of twenty miles.

About all of which, a few conclusions. It is now acceptable on the Left to vilify neoconservatives in the most uncontrolled terms. Where Israel is concerned, the ethics of rhetoric no longer apply on the Left. Podhoretz's letter may have been naive in assuming at least residual conscience there. Vidal enjoys a special immunity as an avowed homosexual. The Nation once again confirms its reputation as the cesspool of opinion journalism.